Last fall, I traveled to the Carter “fold” in the Clinch Mountains of southwestern Virginia. Once the homeplace of The Carter Family, the famous trio who helped usher country music into the modern era, it now served as a bucolic retreat for country singers June Carter Cash and her husband Johnny, the respective daughter and son-in-law of Mother Maybelle Carter. I was there to interview the Man in Black for a story I was writing for No Depression magazine. In fragile health yet still an imposing presence, he was preparing to release The Man Comes Around, the fourth in the series of austere albums he’s made with producer Rick Rubin.
Johnny and I sat in the memorabilia-steeped parlor of the white cottage that Mother Maybelle and her husband Ezra built after the Carters returned to the fold following their stint on border radio in Del Rio, Texas, during the late ’30s and early ’40s. We’d been talking for a couple of hours, when June poked her head into the room, the fire in her azure eyes burning nearly as brightly as ever.
She wanted to play us a rough mix of the version of The Carter Family’s “Storms Are on the Ocean” she’d just recorded for the follow-up to Press On, her Grammy-winning album from 1999. When the track finished playing on the portable boom box we’d had trouble working, June padded her way across the room and sighed, “We’re a little busted down today,” to which her husband tenderly added, “We’re just a little tired.”
It was no wonder. The most celebrated couple in the history of country—and perhaps American—music had logged a combined 110 years in show business between them, a race that ended for June last Thursday when she died, at age 73, of complications due to surgery to replace a heart valve. She underwent the procedure at Baptist Hospital the previous Wednesday, only to suffer cardiac arrest early the next morning, going without oxygen for some 15 to 20 minutes.
The loss has been felt not just within the Carter-Cash family, or even just in the country music community, but throughout the United States and many parts of the world, such was the reach and impact of June Carter Cash’s life and career. Among many other things, her prodigious run encompassed childhood stardom with The Carter Family and a dynamic solo career that included tours with Elvis Presley and a coveted slot on the Prince Albert segment of the Grand Ole Opry. Overshadowing it all was her 35-year marriage to Johnny Cash, one of the great love stories of the 20th century.
Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight...and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us.—Hebrews 12:1
Few have heeded this exhortation with as much devotion as June Carter Cash did, and not just as a woman of faith. For much of her 73 years as a member of the “first family of country music”—as a daughter, wife, mother and grandmother—June fixed her eyes on another, albeit related, goal: preserving and expanding The Carter Family’s musical legacy. This often meant putting her career on hold to care for children and ailing family members. Other times it meant working in the shadow of her husband or of her mother Maybelle, Aunt Sara and Uncle A.P., who formed the original Carter Family in 1927.
Four years ago, though, it was June’s turn to take center stage when, on a honeysuckle-scented evening in mid-May, a host of 200 gathered at the Cash estate in Hendersonville to bear witness to the race that she had run. The occasion was the release of June’s first solo album in nearly a quarter-century, an exquisitely unvarnished and aptly titled collection called Press On. Reissued this spring by the local Dualtone label, the album functions very much as June’s musical autobiography.
The festivities took place under a tent up the hill from the Cashes’ sprawling, three-story home overlooking Old Hickory Lake. There was plenty of good Southern cooking, no booze and an interesting mix of family, media, industry types and celebrities, including George Jones, Connie Smith, Naomi Judd, Tom T. Hall, Jane Seymour and Stacy Keach.
Electrifying the proceedings, however, was the moment that the Man in Black, his wife at his side, stood before the assembly and, like the prophet Isaiah, announced: “Her time has come now.” A standing ovation lasting at least a minute followed, after which June, sitting down with her quaint autoharp, said, “I’ve been real happy paddling along after John, being Mrs. Johnny Cash all these years. But I’m sure thrilled to be up here singing for you tonight.” Joining her onstage was the Cashes’ son, John Carter, on guitar, and June’s daughter Rosie and granddaughter Tiffany Anastasia Lowe singing harmony.
Throughout the evening, June invoked family members who had gone on—her Aunt Sara and Uncle A.P., her father Ezra, and Mother Maybelle, whose 1932 L5 Gibson round-hole guitar June played on her rendition of The Carter Family’s “Wildwood Flower.” She also summoned long-gone friends from what she called her “rock ’n’ roll years”—Hank Williams and Elvis Presley, as well as Tennessee Williams, James Dean and writer-director Elia Kazan, who brought her to New York to study acting in the mid-1950s. By the time she closed her alternately hilarious and poignant set by urging those gathered to sing along to “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” the matriarch of the Carter-Cash clan had not only enlarged the cloud of witnesses that had surrounded her; she had testified to the power of that circle, the nurture of which she made her life’s calling.
Along the way, Valerie June Carter, born June 23, 1929, in Maces Spring, Va., enjoyed a kaleidoscopic career of her own, much of it unfamiliar to people today. As a gangly tomboy with a surefire sense of timing, she provided comic relief for countless Carter Family shows in 1939 and the early 1940s. On radio and on the road with her mother and sisters, she was a mainstay of perhaps the most in-demand country act of the ’40s and ’50s—one that helped launch the career of a young Chet Atkins.
“We had probably the hottest show on WSM back then,” June recalled a month before the party, sitting in the Cashes’ downstairs den, a museum-like vault that holds dozens of photos and mementos from the couple’s fabled career. “According to Artists Service, the outfit that booked dates for Opry acts back then, WSM made more money from The Carter Sisters, and from Mother Maybelle and the Carters, than they made from anyone else on the Opry. We went through a year of working shows with Hank Williams when he said, 'I will not close for the Carter broads.’ And it’s true. Hank never closed for us.”
But it wasn’t just as part of the family act that June achieved acclaim. In 1949, her hilarious Spike Jones-inspired treatment of Frank Loesser’s “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” recorded with the country comedy duo Homer & Jethro, became a Top 10 hit. As a solo act in the mid-’50s, she toured with the young Elvis Presley, with whom she also shared a manager, Colonel Tom Parker. After that, as the protégé of Elia Kazan, who directed Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront and A Streetcar Named Desire, June studied acting at New York’s Neighborhood Playhouse. A raven-haired beauty who possessed what one writer referred to as “down-home sex appeal,” she was a regular on the Jackie Gleason and Jack Paar shows, and made her first movie, Country Music Holiday, co-starring Zsa Zsa Gabor, in 1958.
During the late ’50s and early ’60s, June also worked on the Grand Ole Opry, where she anchored the Prince Albert segment of the program with her gags and gregarious stage presence. “I could carry the first part of the show, just cutting up and playing banjo, guitar and autoharp,” she recalled. “Once I carried it for two hours when [the other regulars] were late getting there.” It was also during this time that she played dates with some of country’s biggest hitmakers, including Marty Robbins, George Jones, Buck Owens and Eddy Arnold.
June’s days in the spotlight were numbered after she met Johnny Cash in the late ’50s. “I first heard of [him] through Elvis Presley,” she explained. “Elvis would make me go into these little cafés and listen to John [on the jukebox] when we played in the South—in the Carolinas and all down through Florida and Georgia. Then, one night backstage at the Opry, this man walked up to me and said, 'I want to meet you, I’m Johnny Cash.’ And I said, 'Well I oughta know who you are. Elvis can’t even tune his guitar unless he goes, “Everybody knows where you go when the sun goes down.” ’ ” June was referring to a line from “Cry, Cry, Cry,” Cash’s first hit for Sun Records in 1955.
By 1961, June was singing and doing standup in Cash’s road show; before she knew it, she was falling for him and trying to save him from his self-destructive ways. She immortalized the mix of desire and trepidation she felt at the time in “Ring of Fire,” a song she co-wrote with Merle Kilgore. Rather than fanning those flames, she gave the song to her sister Anita, for whom it stiffed when released under the title “Love’s Burning Ring of Fire” in 1962. Johnny Cash’s mariachi-style version, on which he sounds like he couldn’t wait to jump into the fire, came out the following year, topping the country charts for seven weeks and reaching the pop Top 20.
“It was a terrible shock when I found out John was taking pills,” June wrote in Among My Klediments, her 1979 autobiography. (“Klediment” is mountain parlance for something one holds dear.) “He dropped a few pills in front of me in Macon, Ga., one afternoon, and I could hardly believe it. I knew he didn’t sleep much at night. You could hear him roaming around his room if you were anywhere near. I could remember how it had been with Hank Williams a few years before when Hank took so much medicine for his bad back, and how my sisters and I worried about him. But the show always had to go on, and ours did. And I found myself fighting hard with Johnny Cash. It was only later that I began to realize I was fighting him for his life.”
“June saved my life,” Cash said four years ago, sitting at home with the woman who had so often flushed his pills down the toilet. “And after that, June and her family kept me steadily on course at times when the rudder was shaky. Maybelle was a great friend, she and Pop Carter both. They were like parents to me. My parents were living in California at the time. They were happy, after they got to know a little about them, that I was spending a lot of time with the Carters because they were people who truly cared for me, as did June. They knew she did. So it was their love and care for me, and the musical influence, and the musical sharing, eventually, with all of them, that was very binding. And we’re all still kind of bound up that way.”
After she married Cash in 1968, June dedicated herself to being a good wife and mother. “John had four daughters the day I married him, and I had two,” she explained. “That gave me six daughters right off the bat, so all of a sudden I’m a big mother now. And then I had our son, John Carter. And then—I don’t remember what year it was, but this was another big surprise—I was named Youth for Christ mother of the year. I said to myself, 'How did I get this?’ And I thought, 'Good Lord, I’ve got seven kids, that’s how I did it.’ I was still working on the road and carrying one of them with me. John Carter would be waiting in the wings until I’d done my part on the show and could run right off and nurse him.”
After the Cashes’ kids were grown—John Carter now has a 7-year-old of his own—June threw herself into nursing her husband, who suffers from several debilitating conditions, including diabetes, neuropathy and glaucoma; she also took care of her sisters Helen and Anita, both of whom died during the past five years. Apart from touring at her husband’s side (the couple won a pair of Grammies for their duet versions of “Jackson” and “If I Were a Carpenter,” from 1967 and 1970) and releasing a solo album called Appalachian Pride in 1975, she in effect shelved her career in the spotlight more than three decades ago.
“June has been so devoted and attached to everything that I’ve been doing all these years,” her husband said in 1999, “that she never really put any thought into doing anything of her own.”
“It was just a choice I made,” she added, sounding less like a submissive homemaker in the Phyllis Schlafly mold than like a woman who knows her own mind. “I guess I could have tried to record, but I didn’t. I didn’t even give it a thought. My ex-sons-in-law, Rodney Crowell, Marty Stuart and Nick Lowe, all would say, 'What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you record again?’ And I’d say, 'Well, I’m awful busy.’ ”
Press On, the album that June made when she finally found time to record again, did more than reacquaint her with audiences that had known and loved her on the Opry, on tour with her husband and on his ABC variety show in the late ’60s and early ’70s. It also introduced many people to her spirited and often hilarious performances for the first time.
“I’d been wanting June to do this for years,” Johnny said at the time of the album’s release. “She’s had it in her to do it. Although she downplays them and diminishes their worth, I knew these songs of hers, I knew that they were very worthy of being on the record. And now what with the diversification of the market, there’s a place for her work. There hadn’t been before.”
Indeed, Cash’s own career got a boost in the 1990s when he signed with producer Rick Rubin’s American Recordings label, a move that has helped him reach an entirely new, much younger audience. “There hadn’t been a place for the work like I did with American,” Cash said. “There hadn’t been. But when you can win a Grammy for some of that kind of work”—as Cash did for his album Unchained in 1997—“you realize there’s a market for it.”
June, who continued to be an integral part of Johnny’s live show throughout much of their marriage, took plenty of inspiration from her husband’s resurgent popularity—in particular, because he’d exercised such strong creative control over the recordings he made. This is something of a rarity for country artists of his generation, many of whom seem content to be packaged as “heritage” acts.
“When John recorded his last two albums, he did them the way he wanted to,” she explained. “And I said, 'Well, if I could do an album the way I wanted to, I might be interested in doing one one of these days.’ Well, Rick Rubin heard me say that. We were playing a lot of places he wanted us to play—the House of Blues in L.A., a lot of rock ’n’ roll places and colleges. We were playing for a lot of young people and it was a lot of fun. They accepted John so well. And they accepted me the same way. I could see no difference in any audience that I’d ever had.”
Vicki Hamilton, an industry veteran who had worked with Guns N’ Roses and Mötley Crüe, was among the converts in this latter-day audience. “Vicki had never been caught up in my music or anything like it,” June said. “But one night, while standing in the wings with Tom Petty and Rick Rubin, she asked Rick if I was ever gonna record again. And Rick said to her, 'I’d love to see her record. Why don’t you do it?’ So Rick asked me if I would talk to Vicki, who had been thinking about starting her own label. He gave me her number and I called her up and she said, 'I love that song about I used to be somebody. It made me cry. And if it can make me cry, as tough as I am, it can make a lot of people cry.’ ”
Recorded at the Cashes’ home studio—a converted log cabin set deep in the woods on the couple’s estate—Press On embraces the homespun aesthetic that June learned from her mother, aunt and uncle. With plenty of relatives and friends pitching in, including longtime Cash collaborator Norman Blake, the record harks back to the family picking sessions that June knew while growing up at the Carter fold in the hills of Virginia.
The Cashes’ son, John Carter, coproduced the album (with J. J. Blair); two of their erstwhile sons-in-law, Marty Stuart and Rodney Crowell, played on the record; and June’s daughter Rosie sang harmony on three tracks. June also sings a duet with her husband on “The Far Side Banks of Jordan,” a moving witness to the couple’s belief that they will be reunited in death—a song made all the more poignant in the wake of June’s passing. It’s very much in the spirit of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” the Carter Family perennial that closes Press On and in many ways serves as the album’s statement of purpose.
Press On may serve as a testament to June’s lifelong commitment to keeping the Carter-Cash circle unbroken, but it also offers more than a glimpse into her colorful and storied life outside the family fold. Most of its 13 songs, eight of them written or co-written by the singer, revisit events unique to her life.
“I Used to be Somebody” finds her looking back wistfully on the 1950s. “I used to be somebody / Dear Lord, where have I been / I ain’t ever gonna see Elvis again,” she mourns, alluding to the time when the circles she ran in included Hank Williams, Patsy Cline and Elvis Presley. These weren’t just passing acquaintances: June was Hank Williams Jr.’s godmother; she and Cline were confidantes; and she was like a big sister to Elvis, teaching him to tune a guitar, inspiring him to buy his first motorcycle (she already had one) and coaching him as he crammed for his first Hollywood screen test.
“I tried in two weeks’ time to teach Elvis everything that I had learned during the whole time I had gone to school,” she recalled. “When he first started, he was way over the top. And I thought, 'Please, Elvis, don’t embarrass me. Please don’t take a bad movie. You could do a part like Brando. Don’t do this to me.’ But he did. And do you know that I have never to this day seen one of those movies all the way through. I was disappointed. Because I knew an Elvis that was capable of doing so much more.”
“I Used to Be Somebody” also reflects on June’s days as a drama student in Manhattan in 1956 and ’57—a move brought about at the urging of director Elia Kazan, who had heard about her from a colleague, screenwriter Budd Schulberg. “Budd had come to a show that I had done in Sarasota, Fla., with Elvis,” June remembered. “He and Kazan were fixing to do a movie called A Face in the Crowd.” The story of a country bumpkin turned TV idol, the picture starred Andy Griffith and Knoxville native Patricia Neal.
“Kazan didn’t know too much about country music and asked Budd if he should go see Elvis,” June went on. “But Budd said, 'I’m not so concerned about Elvis Presley. June Carter is who you need to go see. She’s the most unusual girl I’ve ever seen. I have never laughed so. I have never cried so. I have never had the time I had when she was on stage.’
“So Kazan came to see me one Saturday night at the Opry. I didn’t know it was him at first. All I knew was there was this strange little man who kept following me around. He had a camera, and he kept taking my picture, all kinds of ways. Finally, he walked up to me and said, 'My name is Elia Kazan and I wonder if you’ll come with me and go get a little something to drink.’ So we went across to Linebaugh’s, down there on Lower Broad, and got a Coke and he said, 'I’m going to make a movie in New York. I need to go around and see what country music is like. Will you take me to some of the country places around here?’
“Kazan stayed in Nashville for two weeks and then said, 'I really wish you would come to New York City. I want you to go to school.’ I said, 'Gosh, I have a little girl. What am I gonna do?’ 'You’ll take her with you,’ he said. 'And if you don’t have the money, I’ll send you.’ I said, 'Oh, I have the money. If I go, I don’t wanna be beholden to you in any way. I’m also a good old girl, and I’ll stay that way, thank you. And Mother Maybelle will skin you alive if you try to make it any other way.’ ”
In New York, Kazan took June everywhere with him, exposing her to cultures she’d never imagined. “I was thrown into this group of people,” she said. “I didn’t know what they believed, or if they even believed in God at all. I’m not a Pentecostal. I was raised in the Methodist church, but one of my first memories was looking for Jesus’ face in the clouds—looking there, just searching for it—and I never once ever thought there was any other way. And here I am praying, not just saying the blessing before every meal, but praying for every person I met.”
These were heady, often conflicted, times for a young, God-fearing woman from southern Appalachia—made all the more complicated by the fact that she’d recently split with her first husband, honky-tonker Carl Smith, the man with whom she had her daughter Carlene. Nevertheless, June held her own in the drama classes of Sandy Meisner, the man who groomed Gregory Peck, Robert Duvall and Mary Steenburgen for their Academy Award-winning careers. Before long, though, she’d had enough of New York, as “Gatsby’s Restaurant,” a surreal send-up of life there from Press On, amply attests.
“It was my choice to move back to Tennessee,” she said. “I finally said, 'I can’t do this. I’ve got a daughter to raise.’ I think I could have been a good actor, though.”
As anyone who saw June with Robert Duvall in the opening scene of The Apostle can vouch, she was indeed a gifted improviser. “Bobby paid me a great compliment,” she said, referring to Duvall, who made The Apostle in 1997. “He said, 'This is my first movie to direct and I really would be so happy if we could do our part first, so I’ll be comfortable.’ And so we did. We improvised it. I must’ve sung I don’t know how many songs. He loved 'Far Side Banks of Jordan.’ That’s the one John and I did on [Press On]. It’s my favorite song to sing with John.”
Over the years, June appeared on TV dozens of times, including roles on Gunsmoke, Little House on the Prairie and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. She also starred in several movies, but nothing, she said, gave her as much sense of worth as an actor as when her teacher Sandy Meisner asked her to be the one to present him with his Kennedy Center award.
“It was the greatest compliment that Sandy could have ever paid me,” June said. “Robert Duvall, Mary Steenburgen, Gregory Peck—these wonderful people who he taught were all in Washington to watch him to get this presidential award, and he had to choose someone to give it to him. And of all these people who won Academy Awards, I am the person he chose. That let me know, according to Sandy Meisner, that I could have won an Academy Award, if I had chosen to go that way.”
June’s considerable acting résumé aside, in country circles, it is for her comedy—be it her famous “mud hole gag” or her unforgettable character “Aunt Polly”—that people revere her. Her type of humor has little cachet today, and typically is dismissed as a harbinger of the cornpone comedy of Hee Haw. Time was, though, when June’s barnyard shtick, itself a throwback to minstrel shows and vaudeville, was an integral and much-loved part of the radio barn dances and traveling revues that put country music on the map. Much as their singing and picking counterparts induced people to dance and drink away their blues, country cutups like June afforded hard-hit people a chance to laugh, as Langston Hughes put it, to keep from crying.
“I’ll never forget June Carter in this chartreuse-green chiffon dress, doing her comedy bit,” said Opry star Connie Smith. “She kept me in stitches. Her timing is so great.”
The late Minnie Pearl went one better, once claiming that June had the best timing of any comic she had ever known.
“My uncle A.P. used to say, 'We don’t have any comedy on the show, and it would really be great if you would do something,’ ” June recalled. “So here I was, this little bitty kid, and I got this big board, a plank, and put it under my arm. I’d just walk across the stage. They’d be trying to sing some of their funnier songs and I’d just walk across the stage pulling that plank. And they’d turn around and look at me until my Uncle A.P. would finally say, 'What are you doing?’ And I’d say, 'We’ll, I’m looking for a room. I’ve got my board.’ That was my first bit.
“So I did these improvisations. I could just talk about anything, and it seemed to be funny. I had a great following. People would want to hug my neck and pinch me. They’d send me cakes in the mail. They’d crochet me bedspreads.”
This humor is evident throughout Press On, but nowhere so much as on “Tiffany Anastasia Lowe.” The song is a cautionary tale that June wrote for her granddaughter, Tiffany, an aspiring actor enthralled by the movies of director Quentin Tarantino—whose surname June pronounces “Tarantina.” (Tiffany is the daughter of Carlene Carter and British producer/musician Nick Lowe.)
“Quentin Tarantino’s women sometimes get stuck with a hypodermic needle,” June sings. But before she can add, “They dance a lot and lose a lot of blood,” she breaks into a belly laugh, an unguarded and utterly beguiling moment that brings to mind the associative, and often hilarious, monologues of Woody Guthrie and the young Bob Dylan.
The former comparison couldn’t be more fitting, given that Guthrie’s “originals” appropriated many a Carter Family tune, and quite a few lines of verse. “If you want to sing a Woody Guthrie song, I can sing you The Carter Family song where he got it,” June smiled, citing how “This Land Is Your Land” draws heavily on the Carters’ “Lulu Walls.”
“Woody’s widow even acknowledged as much at his induction to the Songwriters Hall Fame,” June went on. “Woody would always write to Uncle A.P. At one point, Uncle A.P. sent him a telegram, and Woody carried it till it was worn out in his billfold.”
When pressed, June said that her forebears’ role as a repository of Anglo-Celtic ballads stands as their most significant contribution to the music of the 20th century. “Uncle A.P. collected a lot of the ballads as they’d cross the mountain, or from different parts of the country,” she said. “There would be people from Ireland, from Scotland, from some of those places that might have a poem, or even just a piece of a poem. Somewhere, they had to survive. And my mother and Aunt Sara were great with melodies, and they were great with anything they did.”
As a testimony to the ongoing power of this canon—one to which all country, and a good bit of pop and rock music of the past 70 years refers—June framed Press On with a pair of Carter Family songs. “I put bookends on it,” she said, referring to “Diamonds in the Rough” and “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” “I dedicate so much of what I’ve done to my mother, and to my Aunt Sara. They were both committed to doing the same kind of thing when they were together, to continuing on with it. I owe them so much, and still do.
“I think God put his hand on The Carter Family and said, 'OK, you can be A.P. Carter, you can be Maybelle Carter, you can be Sara Carter.’ God also put his hand on people like Hank Williams, and said, 'You can be Hank Williams,’ and to Johnny Cash, 'You can be Johnny Cash.’ And God put his hand on Elvis Presley and said, 'You can be Elvis Presley.’ But God has done that very few times. And God has been good enough to let me stand in the shadow of all these people—people that have either been very close to me, or that have been my blood. And somewhere God has said, 'OK, June, you are a part of this.’ If you stop and think about it, that’s an awfully powerful thing.”
A version of this piece originally appeared in No Depression magazine.
